now, I see you. When I was with her, I saw you. When you didn’t come back, I missed you.’ He clutched his head, the fingertips blanched white as he squeezed hard against his skull, as though the thoughts, the feelings, the pain, could be forced out. ‘I missed you and everything’s wrong. It was so clear before, what I had to do. Ever since I woke up, it’s always felt like . . . something’s missing, a part of me. And it has to be them. It must be. They’re my family.’ His hands dropped down as he looked back at her, looking defeated. Worn down. ‘It can’t be you.’
‘. . . I know,’ she said again, not daring to move. Her heart was pounding like a jackhammer, the shock of his words still rebounding through her body like pinballs. ‘I’m sorry.’
They stared at one another, unable to move closer, unable to pull away in an unbearable fixed tension that couldn’t be broken. ‘Today’s the day I’m getting them back,’ he said slowly, decisively, though she couldn’t tell if he was convincing her, or himself. ‘I’m not waiting another hour. When I go back down there, I’m telling Max everything.’
She nodded, feeling his eyes travelling over her skin like fingertips, touching her, feather-light. ‘Okay.’
Their eyes locked and the magnetic attraction sprang to attention again. He waited. And waited. ‘. . . This is where you tell me that she’s happy with him.’
Bell swallowed. ‘She was. But now she’s happy with you.’
He waited, his stare becoming more fixed, resolute. ‘This is where you tell me that I’ll never be half the father Max is.’
She forced herself to look back at him. ‘You love your son. That’s all he needs.’
A small sound escaped him, something between a groan and a plea. ‘And this is where you tell me that when you were with Mats . . .’ His voice cracked. ‘That you didn’t think of me.’
Reflexively, she looked away, the lie lodged in her throat, immovable, untellable. Because the truth was, eyes closed, he was all she’d seen and all she’d felt.
‘Bell –’ There was heat in the word, shape to a need, as he stepped towards her . . .
But she stepped away. ‘No. You’re doing the right thing,’ she whispered, her eyes shining with tears as he stared back at her, so close and yet a world away. ‘It’s not me.’
He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the pain relief to kick in and trying to still his mind; but the headache and his emotions had fused into some kind of vortex whirling through him, a roar of images and sounds and feelings that he could neither control nor contain.
Seeing Max had been harder than he’d anticipated, dredging up feelings and memories he didn’t want. Friendship-boyhood-adventure-fishing-drinking-weddings – Hanna.
Hanna. Always her.
He closed his eyes and she filled his head again. Flash of blonde. Pale skin. Blue eyes. Blackness. The last thing he saw and the first thing he saw. Blue eyes crying. Pale skin. Blonde . . .
His mind stopped, automatically rewound. Flash of blonde. Pale skin. Blue eyes crying. The last thing he saw. Blue eyes crying . . .
He stared at the ceiling, feeling his heart pound like it was going to burst from his chest, his body held captive to his mind, pain spearing through him as he lay rigid on the mattress while the memories played on and on in a loop – successive, continual. Stuck. Blue eyes crying. Blackness. The last thing he saw.
Blue eyes crying. Blackness.
Blue eyes crying. Black.
Blue eyes crying. Black.
Blue eyes crying.
. . .
Black car.
Ingarso, Stockholm archipelago, 25 June 2012 – midnight
She lay in his arms, both of them watching the full moon drift slowly above, framed by the almost perfect circle. The crater walls were ragged and frilled like a jellyfish, the dark water glimmering darkly just a few metres from their feet, hissing into the sand in rhythmic breaths.
She had already been in the water when he’d arrived, her skin so pale she could have been a mermaid. They had swum, they had chased and they had succumbed, over and over. Those years of abstinence, of doing the right thing, had done nothing to dull their appetite for one another; on the contrary, they had heightened it and he understood what a half-life he had walked through till now, thinking it could be enough to inhabit the periphery of her world.